SIte Redesign - Disaster for Organic Traffic
-
A client just redesigned their site and launched it around May 30. The organic traffic has had a MAJOR drop and has not returned yet. All of the old pages have been 301 redirected to the new pages. Any thoughts on what could be causing this to www.brickhousesecurity.com?
In Google Webmaster Tools, before the redesign we were receiving about 300,000 impressions and 10-12,000 clicks. Now the impressions are only 100,000 with half as many clicks.
Thanks!
-
You'll also want to check whether you have fewer pages indexed now than before the redesign. if you have significantly fewer pages, you'll have lost a lot of long-tail search query traffic.
Check out what search terms brought traffic before, and to what page, compared to after the redesign as well.
Paul
-
You can use the analytics to tell where the traffic drops are coming from but I think that you need to get to why Google or some other search engine traffic is dropping. So I totally agree with what EGOL mentions, but I think you already have a global grasp that traffic has dropped. Here are what I would suggest are next steps to then fix the issues of why the traffic has dropped.
Odds are is that technically you may have a problem going on.
Go through your GWT reports for crawl errors and HTML optimization etc. We relaunched and it gave us all kinds of clues on what to fix.
You need to double check all of your 301 paths - I bet that there are some holes. This is down and dirty detail work. I bet that they are probably not as correct as you think. Don't assume that if you test a few the rest are ok. Dont assume that the developer says that they are working that they are working. Run them through a tool to make sure that you are sending a 301 response. I had a site that was using 302 responses vs 301 (a temporary vs a permanent redirect). Verify, verify, verify.
Did you change title tags on your pages. Titles are a big signal and if you change them, you can see a drop. You can look at your traffic and ranking analysis to look at sample pages. If you did do a radical change, you may want to go back to your original title tag methods.
Run site speed tools
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=www.brickhousesecurity.com&mobile=false
See if your speed has dropped. The GWT will also show over time if your site is speeding up or slowing down. You may need to look at your server setup.
Verify the HTML
Did you setup
It looks like you may have changed a bunch of things at once and so it is hard to tell what you changed so see what was impacted. Usually in cases like this, Google is trying to figure out the changes and so it may take a while to sort out. I just gave some examples, but you need to review everything that has changed and see what the differences are. There are some things, even with a 301 redirects that are correct, if you changed the URL structure and title tags and the new site has HTML that does not validate, Google may take a while to sort it out. I had a site that we did a complete overhaul and it was 6 months before the traffic came back and that was with pretty good controls in place.
Good luck!
-
Here is the key for diagnosing a problem like this.
Do this assessment.....
-
where traffic was coming from before the drop
-
where traffic is coming from now
-
use 1 and 2 to determine what traffic you lost
-
go to those SERPs to see what happened
-
look at your pages to determine the cause
(If you don't have old analytics see if you can get raw logs off of server and look at them with a tool like weblogexpert - free low feature version if you don't want to pay)
The above will tell you if you had a traffic loss. However, your post complains about an impression loss. That is very different. For that use weblogexpert to determine if your problem is really an engagement loss rather than a traffic loss. If that is the case then the new design fails to connect visitors to content as well as the original design. To solve that you need better site navigation and cues that lead to deeper content.
-
-
i dunno how it is for everyone else, but the site was really slow to me. Try using different image formats instead of png's. maybe try jpg's?
we had this as a problem, made a few changes, and our site speed went up instantaneously
other thing is make sure your CSS and javascript are in external files when can be, although its usually the images and other media that are playing the major role in site speed
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How do I get the sub-domain traffic to count as sub-directory traffic without moving off of WordPress?
I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
301 redirects for a redesign.
About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice. The current site is a old template site from another provider. They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product. So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site? I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what? The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage). But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition. Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must. I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now. Thanks for all your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonrj0 -
Site not indexed in Google UK
This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly. www.loftconversionswestsussex.com Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please? Cheers, SEO5..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0